If they requirement is that jurors have not heard of the President of the United State from 2016 to 2020, then they are going to get people of such low intelligence/awareness that they’ll be the sort of politically incompetent/naive that was mined effectively on social media to believe that Nazis were socialists.
soooo, if they had gone with trump’s suggestion of cash, would this have ever happened?
Depends on how carefully they could have hidden the process by which they converted money in a bank to a briefcase full of bills. Yes, fatcats have piles of cash sitting about in vaults. But that stash also needs to be replenished from time to time. Which leaves trails.
right, moving large amounts of cash triggers scrutiny. too bad the casinos went bankrupt.
Well part of it is you don’t just draw 150K at once, if you are as rich and succesful as he claimed you gradually accumulate ten thou here and five thou there until you have over the years a million in cash spread around lockboxes at your different homes in case of such “unusual situations”. And if anyone finds out and asks, “I just like to go around flinging big wads of cash for the sake of the image” or “I like to have big piles of cash around to roll around in to relax after a succesful deal” would be a perfectly cromulent explanation for a supposed multibillionaire putz.
But it’s the whole recurring thing about not using his own personal money but drawing it from the businesses.
(And really, for someone who “could shoot a man on Fifth Avenue and not lose votes”, he was a bit too concerned with news of dallying with fast women.)
Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
IANAL, but I was a business owner.
I would hazard a guess that falsification of business records is almost always done in furtherance of another crime, and that other crime is tax related the large majority of the time. People don’t deliberately falsify records for the fun of it, there’s always an underlying reason.
And even in the rare cases where the intent of the falsification isn’t a crime……say the owner of a family business is misclassifying expenses to hide an affair from his wife who also works in the business, if that falsification results in a tax benefit, you still have your second crime.
In this case it’s clear that the falsification of the records provided the Trump Organization with a tax deduction that they were not entitled to, even if that was not their primary purpose of falsifying the records. And it’s probably going to be pretty easy to prove that they took those deductions.
But here’s the catch……I believe, based on my own experience as a New York City business owner and something I read recently with regards to this case…the statute of limitations has already tolled on the tax avoidance stuff. I’m pretty sure it’s only 3 years on tax-related offenses, although there may be other circumstances that extend it. I know when our businesses were getting state sales tax audits, they only went back three years.
Which means the statute of limitations was up while Trump was still in office.
Which is why the tax offenses weren’t charged, I think. But they still should be easy to prove. No need to even go to campaign finance violations.
I’m going to make a prediction. Trump, at some point between now and December, is going to plead this out, maybe even getting it bumped down to a misdemeanor, and pay a hefty fine. He will claim he did it because he needs to devote his energies to his campaign instead of fighting this persecution.
ETA - I also believe that Trump’s lame attempts at intimidating the grand jury and prosecutors were the final nail in his indictment coffin. I think that even if the grand jury had been considering not indicting, they might have felt it would look like they’d been intimidated into backing down….and they are New Yorkers, after all.
Based on what I’ve read, this should not matter for establishing the elements of the falsification crime. Right?
I don’t think so, but IANAL.
I can’t tell if you’re saying you don’t think it should matter, or you don’t think it shouldn’t matter.
Thing is, Gov. Cuomo suspended statues of limitations a couple of times; the longest (IIRC) of which was COVID-related. CNN’s coverage during the arraignment is my cite.
My guess is you’re correct. Also, they were saying on CNN yesterday that the statute of limitations in NY is tolled when you’re out of the jurisdiction for extended periods of time, and was tolled during COVID as well. But assuming the tax stuff can’t be prosecuted, it’s still a crime for the business records offenses.
I think it shouldn’t matter, anyway. It’s still a crime and it can be easily proven even if it can’t be charged. But again, IANAL.
But I will add, as a former NYC business owner, that if I had done something like this and it had become public knowledge, I would’ve been prosecuted.
I’ve known business owners that were prosecuted for tax avoidance for much smaller offenses involving much smaller sums of money.
To be specific, I knew a fellow business owner that was criminally prosecuted for because his NYC business bought around $2000 worth of alcoholic beverages for use as gifts to NYC clients from a shop in New Jersey in order to avoid the NYC sales taxes. He didn’t go to trial, he plead guilty and paid a hefty fine and did some community service, despite the fact that he wasn’t aware of the particular law that made this illegal. He made a public statement of apology that included the phrase “ignorance of the law is no excuse”.
If he hadn’t been ignorant of the law, he might’ve gotten away with it because he wouldn’t have opened his mouth in front of the wrong people, but he got caught. It may be worth noting that the taxes he evaded came to less than $200 but he was still prosecuted.
I’m concerned that this prosecution is going to help Trump in his quest for martyrdom, but letting it slide really isn’t fair to the people that obey the laws and the people that have been prosecuted for much less.
That’s harsh. But it is a violation.
https://www.tax.ny.gov/pubs_and_bulls/tg_bulletins/st/use_tax_for_businesses.htm
Is that true, though? Who was defrauded by the false records? The state of NY? They got tax revenue from Cohen that should have come from the Trump Organization, sure. But they didn’t get any less revenue than they would have gotten anyways, unless I’m misunderstanding the payment. They may have even gotten more.
I guess I’m stuck on the “attempt to defraud” part of the statute. Who was being defrauded by the fact that the payments were categorized as “legal services under retainer” when they were actually “pay a porn star not to talk”? Somebody has to be out money or property for it to be fraud, right? Not every deception is fraud.
Someone upthread (I think it was in this thread…) asked for a list of previous convictions based on this statute. I found such a list here: Survey of Past New York Felony Prosecutions for Falsifying Business Records
I would note, in reference to my previous post, that all of these involved schemes to defraud the state or another individual out of money.
The Trump Organization improperly characterized the payments as legal fees and took a tax deduction they were not entitled too, therefore depriving NYC of tax revenue. I don’t see how the fact that this may have increased the tax bill of a third party offsets this.
IANAL but I’m pretty sure tax law doesn’t work this way, otherwise I might have run my business very differently.
Not so extreme; the question is meant to find out if anyone has a personal connection to a lawyer, party or witness that could bias the juror’s judgment.
That’s a great find. Definitely something I was looking for. Thanks.
I posted in the Indictment threat that Trumps 34 counts consist of falsifying business records that basically affect three different types of “other crimes” to bump these all to felonies. This helps clarify it for me, maybe it’ll help others:
1 - NY law about NY stuff (e.g. NY tax law about NY taxes not paid);
2 - NY law about Federal stuff (NY election law about federal election stuff);
3 - Federal law about federal election stuff (same as 2, but based on a federal election law).
I skimmed your link, and your lists re: the “other crime” that makes this a felony, seems to be all about No. 1 - crimes tied to NY laws about NY stuff (mostly defrauded NY entities). I did not go through each one so would definitely be open to fact checking.
No. 2 doesn’t appear controversial - as far as what other experts are saying.
No. 3 - federal law about federal stuff, is what is uncharted (no appellate decisions/clarity on whether the intent of the “other crimes” was meant to involve other jurisdictional crimes). Very well could be, but just an unknown as far as the Courts are concerned (it’s never come up to be addressed). It will in Trump’s case if he doesn’t plea out.
So, even if Trump somehow gets out of 3, it still leaves a lot of felonies that are likely to be upheld. There’s no legal way to get out of No. 1 - that would have to be a purely factual defense.
There are some Statute of Limitations issues in play, but I expect those to be denied by trial court and dealt with at the appellate level and survive there.
Finally, the misdemeanor part of all this is slam dunk case legally/factually.
Apparently not, at least at the state level. I just found this very informative article on the subject. There is well-established case law to support a fraud charge when the fraudsters intent was to frustrate the states power to enforce its own law, the case is, someone amusingly, People vs Kase.
An example of this might be an underaged person’s use of a fake drivers license to gain access to an establishment where alcohol is served.